This story was originally published on June 8, 2023. View submissions from the 2023 Images of Research competition.
How do you get someone to care about your research? The answer, we think, is storytelling. While research is generally for those in the inner circle of the field to engage with, because research focuses inward and drills down on something very narrowly, stories do the opposite.
We think of storytelling as a textural layer of research that can evoke emotion, empathy and understanding. The words you might use to describe those feelings aren’t the same as what you might use when typing out a report. One of the best ways to accomplish this and engage a non-specialist audience is through visual storytelling. It not only makes people more likely to tune in to the research, but more willing to engage, as it opens up the conversation by creating space for the audience to interact with the research through their own lens.
Doing research always involves telling a story, but the ways in which stories are told varies. Each mode of storytelling, like a summary abstract for a conference or a PhD dissertation, is a different kind of tool. Developing the capacity to tell brief stories that are easily understood by non-experts is a vital part of research communication, because succinct stories told in everyday language can engage a wide range of others and help them understand the meaningfulness and excitement of doing research. By transitioning the “what” of research to the “why,” and inviting people to listen and respond through their own stories, it creates the conditions for dialogue in meaningful ways.That is how research can come alive.
Through Images of Research, we challenge graduate students at the University of Alberta to share a visual representation of their work as they “see” it with audiences that otherwise may not have the opportunity to engage with that research. This is knowledge mobilization — taking what they know and making it accessible in spaces and communities it wasn’t before — in action, and it is one way students can make a greater impact through their research. That is, to represent the complex activities of research through the format of a single image requires students to translate what are often language-based activities undertaken over time, into a single visual moment. Such an act of translation takes deep thought and skills of transformation. These are skills we want graduate students at the university to have.
At its core, the university is about generating exciting ideas that spark conversation and benefit the public good. The demand to make connections for your research beyond those working directly in your field is a demand we see everywhere — community organizations, funders, public consultations, etc. — and doing so can affect others in ways that might range from influencing an institution’s policies or programs to sparking an individual’s curiosity to look further into a topic. Recognizing the importance of knowledge mobilization is recognizing the importance of sharing, not only what has been learned from research, but also sharing the excitement, challenge and meaningfulness of the processes of discovery.
Working with graduate student research at the university is invigorating and reminds us why we want to be around campus. We feed off the energy and enthusiasm of the students, and hope others do, too.
You can see this work in action in this year’s Images of Research competition. Student research images will be on display at the Digital Scholarship Centre through June 13, 2024.
